His writing style is equally slippery: consider his fondness for puns, which reveal how easily words, like people, can have more to them than first meets the ear or the syntax of his sentences, which uncoil inquiringly across the page to dramatise both the directions and the indirections of desire, the shape of finished thoughts and the sound of somebody thinking.

The idea that each of us contains many possible selves, patiently waiting to be liberated by circumstance, has long been an attractive one for Proust's biographers, who have drawn attention to the large number of Prousts who seemed to live within the same skin: the reclusive socialite (Proust's most recent biographer in English, Edmund White, describes him as a 'playboy-monk') the critic of habit who lived according to strict routines the sensitive aesthete who became sexually excited by watching caged rats being stabbed with hatpins. And as Marcel loses his grip on Albertine, so he loses his grip on himself: 'It may be because the personalities I perceived in her at that time were so various,' he confesses, 'that I later took to turning into a different person, depending on which Albertine was in my mind: I became a jealous man, an indifferent man, a voluptuary, a melancholic, a madman.'

Sometimes Albertine's face looks dull and sullen, sometimes glowing and sultry sometimes his gaze is arrested by the pink tip of her kittenish nose, sometimes his eyes slide over her rosy cheeks as if they were as frictionless as the surface of a painted miniature. Towards the end of the second volume of In Search of Lost Time, much of which has been taken up with long and longing descriptions of his lover Albertine, Proust's narrator puzzles over the fact that he seems to be obsessed by many different girls who happen to share the same name. Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Timeedited by Christopher Prendergast

In search of lost time box set